Thursday, July 28, 2011

An excellent op-ed piece was posted by James Taylor (a senior fellow on environmental policy at The Heartland Institute) on a blog at Forbes.com yesterday. You can see his full posting here.

The main point of the article is driven home in the first paragraph:

"NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted..."

As a little background... one of the main theories of the global warming alarmist crowd has been that the phenomenon will lead to higher humidity in the upper-levels of the atmosphere, which will cause more cirrus cloud development, thereby trapping greater amounts of heat in the lower levels of the atmosphere. The NASA satellite data cited in the article indicate that this is simply not happening.

The data cited in the article were reported in a recent study conducted in part by Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The results of that study were recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Remote Sensing.

The article by Taylor goes on to state:

"...the central premise of alarmist global warming theory is that carbon dioxide emissions should be directly and indirectly trapping a certain amount of heat in the earth’s atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space. Real-world measurements, however, show far less heat is being trapped in the earth’s atmosphere than the alarmist computer models predict, and far more heat is escaping into space than the alarmist computer models predict."

I wholeheartedly agree with the closing paragraph of the article, which states:

"When objective NASA satellite data, reported in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, show a “huge discrepancy” between alarmist climate models and real-world facts, climate scientists, the media and our elected officials would be wise to take notice. Whether or not they do so will tell us a great deal about how honest the purveyors of global warming alarmism truly are."